The main challenge was the novel’s convoluted
structure: the chapters are ordered chronologically until the middle of
the book, at which point the sequence reverses; the book thus begins and
ends in the nineteenth century. This couldn’t work in a film. “It would
be impossible to introduce a new story ninety minutes in,” Lana said.
The filmmakers’ initial idea was to establish a connective trajectory
between Dr. Goose, a devious physician who may be poisoning Ewing, in
the earliest story line, and Zachry, the tribesman on whose moral
choices the future of civilization hinges, after the Fall. They had no
idea what to do with all the other story lines and characters. They
broke the book down into hundreds of scenes, copied them onto colored
index cards, and spread the cards on the floor, with each color
representing a different character or time period. The house looked like
“a Zen garden of index cards,” Lana said. At the end of the day, they’d
pick up the cards in an order that they hoped would work as the arc of
the film. Reading from the cards, Lana would then narrate the rearranged
story. The next day, they’d do it again.
It was on the day
before they left Costa Rica that they had a breakthrough: they could
convey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the
novel, by having the same actors appear in multiple story lines—“playing
souls, not characters,” in Tykwer’s words. This would allow the
narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same
time. On the flight home, Lana and Andy carried the stack of
rubber-banded cards they would soon convert into the first draft of the
screenplay, which they then sent to Tykwer. The back-and-forth between
the three filmmakers continued, the viability of their collaboration
still not fully confirmed.
By August, the trio had a completed
draft to send to Mitchell. The Wachowskis had had a difficult experience
adapting “V for Vendetta,” from a comic book whose author, Alan Moore,
hated the very idea of Hollywood adaptation and berated the project
publicly. “We decided in Costa Rica that—as hard and as long as it might
take to write this script—if David didn’t like it, we were just going
to kill the project,” Lana said.
Mitchell, who lives in the
southwest of Ireland, agreed to meet the filmmakers in Cork. In “a
seaside hotel right out of ‘Fawlty Towers,’ ” as Lana described it, they
recounted for the author the painstaking process of disassembling the
novel and reassembling it into the script he’d read. “It’s become a bit
of a joke that they know my book much more intimately than I do,”
Mitchell wrote to me. They explained their plan to unify the narratives
by having actors play transmigrating souls. “This could be one of those
movies that are better than the book!” Mitchell exclaimed at the end of
the pitch. The pact was sealed with pints of Murphy’s stout at a local
pub.
In
June, 2011, the Wachowskis and Tykwer were in Berlin, working on
preproduction for “Cloud Atlas.” In the living room of Lana’s apartment
on Unter den Linden, where a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of
Sodom” was being used as a doorstop, the three directors talked about
their passion for the movie. Andy, who was forty-three, was wearing a
washed-out T-shirt and a pair of Crocs with a South Korean flag on them,
which went nicely with the middle-aged grunginess of his shaved scalp.
Lana, who was about to turn forty-six, had a full head of pink
dreadlocks. Tykwer, at forty-six, was wiry and energetic, with striking
green eyes. The three resembled a former alternative-rock band—the
Cinemaniacs—overdue for a reunion tour.
“ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a
twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpoint
between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea
that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was
screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future
and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would
allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were
younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and
ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.”
Andy agreed. “
‘Cloud Atlas’ is our getting back to the spectacle of the sixties and
seventies, the touchstone movies,” he said, rubbing his bald dome like a
magic lantern.
The model for their vision, they explained, was
Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which the Wachowskis had
first seen when Lana, then Larry, was ten and Andy seven.
The
siblings grew up in a close-knit family in Beverly, a middle-class
neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Their parents—Ron, a businessman,
and Lynne, a nurse—were film enthusiasts. They dragged Larry and Andy
and their two sisters to any movie they found interesting, ignoring the
parental-advisory labels. “We would have ‘movie orgies’—double features,
triple features, drive-ins,” Andy recalled. “I was so young that I
didn’t know what the word ‘orgy’ meant, but I knew that, whatever it
was, I liked it.”
Lana initially hated “2001,” and was perplexed
by the mysterious presence of the black monolith. “That’s a symbol,” Ron
explained. Lana told me, “That simple sentence went into my brain and
rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve
been the same since. Something clicked inside. ‘2001’ is one of the
reasons I’m a filmmaker.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Lana’s gender
consciousness started to emerge at around the same time. In third grade,
Larry transferred to a Catholic school, where boys and girls wore
different uniforms and stood in separate lines before class. “I have a
formative memory of walking through the girls’ line and hesitating,
knowing that my clothes didn’t match,” Lana told me. “But as I continued
on I felt I did not belong in the other line, so I just stopped in
between them. I stood for a long moment with everyone staring at me,
including the nun. She told me to get in line. I was stuck—I couldn’t
move. I think some unconscious part of me figured I was exactly where I
belonged: betwixt.” Larry was often bullied for his betwixtness. “As a
result, I hid and found tremendous solace in books, vastly preferring
imagined worlds to this world,” Lana said.
It was around the time
that Larry and Andy saw “2001” that they first directed together: on
cassette tape, they read a play inspired by the “Shadow” comic books and
radio programs. Soon, they were writing and drawing their own comics.
Their creative process, Lana said, “hasn’t essentially changed since.”
The brothers were inseparable. “Larry would come up with a crazy idea,”
Ron Wachowski recalled, “to hang ropes from a tree and make a swing or
trapeze, and Andy would be the person to grab hold of the rope, climb,
and crash down.” The boys spent sleepless weekends playing Dungeons
& Dragons in the attic, coming downstairs only to raid the fridge.
“In D. & D., you have nothing but your imagination,” Lana said. “It
asks all of the players to try to imagine the same space, the same
image. This is very much the process of making a film.” The Wachowski
brothers and some friends even wrote a three-hundred-page game of their
own, called High Adventure. “We were often frustrated by genre
differentiation, whether it was in games or in fiction,” Lana said. “In
our naïve and foolish innocence, we dared to imagine a utopian world
where all genres could intermix.”
In high school, Larry and Andy
started a house-painting business to earn money for college. (Their only
previous experience was a pantheon of superheroes that they had painted
on their aunt’s garage door.) Larry took out a loan and went to Bard,
but dropped out after a couple of years. “I thought the teachers had to
be way smarter than me to justify the loan,” Lana told me, “but some of
them hadn’t read half the books I’d read.” He moved to Portland, Oregon,
to write, working on, among other things, an adaptation of William
Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” (Having finished the script, he
cold-called Goldman to ask for the rights; Goldman hung up on him.)
After Andy dropped out of Emerson College in his sophomore year, the
brothers reunited in Chicago, where they started a construction
business, learning most of the skills on the job. They once built an
elevator shaft without any plans or previous experience, having
projected unquestionable confidence to the people who’d hired them—not
an unuseful talent in the film business.
All
the while, the Wachowskis kept on writing: in the early nineties, Larry
went to New York to knock on the doors of the comic-book publishers. He
managed to get himself and Andy hired by Marvel Comics, to write for
the series “Ectokid,” which was drawn by Steve Skroce. The brothers also
worked on screenplays of their own. “Carnivore,” their first completed
script—in which a soup kitchen feeds the poor by chopping up rich people
and cooking them in an addictive stew—was sent out to ten addresses,
selected from an agent handbook. Two agents offered to sign the
brothers. In the end, they went with Lawrence Mattis, who is now their
manager. These days, the mention of “Carnivore”—which never became a
movie—makes the Wachowskis chuckle, but Mattis remembers “a surety to
their writing that really popped.”
The blockbuster-film producer
Dino De Laurentiis optioned the Wachowskis’ next screenplay,
“Assassins,” while they were renovating their parents’ house. De
Laurentiis entertained them with champagne and lascivious stories about
beautiful actresses, and then sold the script to Warner Bros. for five
times what he’d paid. According to Lana, substantial revisions by a
hired writer removed “all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the
idea that within our world there are moral pocket universes that operate
differently.” When the movie was made, in 1995 (directed by Richard
Donner, of “Lethal Weapon” fame, and starring Sylvester Stallone,
Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore), the Wachowskis tried to get their
names taken off the credits but failed. Still, the script earned them a
deal with Warner Bros. They finished the work on their parents’ house,
quit construction, and became full-time filmmakers.
By
1994, the Wachowskis had completed the first script for the “Matrix”
trilogy. They’d had the idea while working on a comic-book proposal.
They were thinking, Lana recalled, “about ‘real worlds’ and ‘worlds
within worlds’ and the problem of virtual reality in movies, and then it
hit us: What if this world was the virtual world?” The trilogy
is set in a dystopian future where machines exploit human energy by
keeping people perpetually comatose in pods, while placating their minds
with a continuous simulated reality called the Matrix. A small group of
liberated humans—Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity—fight back, through
confrontations with the virtual Agent Smith, and the stark darkness of
the machine-controlled world is countered by the feeble light of human
solidarity. “When I first read ‘The Matrix,’ ” Mattis told me, “I called
them all excited because they’d written a script about Descartes.”
According to Mattis, the Wachowskis were “the hot flavor of the
month” when he sent the “Matrix” screenplay out, in 1994. “But then
everyone read the script and passed. Nobody got it,” he said. “To this
day, I think Warner Bros. bought it half out of the relationship with
them and half because they thought something was there.” The brothers
had spent two years writing the script, and they insisted on directing
the movie. To prove themselves, they took on a smaller project first:
“Bound,” with Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, a
lesbian thriller with a happy ending. “Bound” convinced Warner Bros. The
Wachowskis shot “The Matrix” in a hundred and eighteen days. To make
the movie, the brothers and their visual-effects team developed a number
of new techniques, most famously “bullet time,” which allowed them to
create the effect of a bullet progressing through space in slow motion,
by using virtual cinematography to manipulate a series of still shots
taken along the bullet’s trajectory.
“The Matrix,” which opened
on March 31, 1999, took in nearly thirty million dollars in its first
weekend. Eventually, it earned close to half a billion dollars
worldwide, and four Academy Awards. Audiences responded to its cool,
ultramodern style while rooting for its heroes, whose only reliable
power was their old-fashioned humanity. “The Wachowskis have a mythic
sensibility,” David Mitchell told me, “consciously clothing ancient
stories in new dress, language, and form.” The movie’s philosophical
underpinnings won it a cult following, as well as numerous academic
studies, with such titles as “Neo-Materialism and the Death of the
Subject” and “Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge.” The Slovenian
philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written about the “Matrix” trilogy, and
titled his book on the responses to 9/11 “Welcome to the Desert of the
Real”—a quotation from the movie, which is, in turn, an allusion to a
line from Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”
The two
former construction workers from Chicago were suddenly stars of the
global movie industry. In the contract they signed with Warner Bros.,
however, the Wachowskis included a no-press clause. Avoiding the
scrutinizing glare of the industry press, they gave no interviews and
did no publicity; they stayed loyal to Chicago, close to their family.
“My desire for anonymity is rooted in two things,” Andy told me in an
e-mail. “An aversion to celebrity (I like walking into a comics shop and
nobody knowing who I am) and the fact that there’s something nicely
egalitarian about anonymity. You know, equality and shit.”
With
the “Matrix” rage in full swing, the Wachowskis moved to Australia to
work on the second and third parts of the trilogy. “The Matrix Reloaded”
and “The Matrix Revolutions,” released in May and November of 2003,
respectively, earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, but the
production process was notoriously difficult; the shooting alone took
nearly three hundred days. In addition to the usual stresses of
movie-making—constructing a world from scratch; managing hundreds of
people; dealing with actorly egos—the crew had to cope with tragedy. Two
actors died before filming all their scenes. Then a grip committed
suicide. At the insistence of his boss, the grip’s girlfriend went to
Bali with a friend to recuperate, only to witness her friend’s death in
the 2002 terrorist attack there, in which Islamist militants’ bombs
killed more than two hundred people.
At the same time, Larry, who
had separated from his wife, was dealing with depression and struggling
with his gender situation. During the production, he told Andy that the
reason he went swimming in the bay every morning, rather than in the
pool, was that he was half hoping to be hit by a boat or attacked by a
shark. “For years, I couldn’t even say the words ‘transgendered’ or
‘transsexual,’ ” Lana told me. “When I began to admit it to myself, I
knew I would eventually have to tell my parents and my brother and my
sisters. This fact would inject such terror into me that I would not
sleep for days. I developed a plan that I worked out with my therapist.
It was going to take three years. Maybe five. A couple of weeks into the
plan, my mom called.”
Sensing that something was wrong, Lynne
Wachowski flew to Australia the following day. The morning after her
arrival, Larry told her, “I’m transgender. I’m a girl.” Lynne didn’t
know what he meant. “I was there when you were born,” she said. “There’s
a part of me that is a girl,” Larry insisted. “I’m still working at
that.” Lynne had been distraught on the plane, worried that she might
lose her son. “Instead, I’ve just found out there is more of you,” she
said. Ron, who soon flew in, too, offered his unconditional support, as
did Larry’s sisters and Andy, who had suspected for a while.
A
couple of days later, the Wachowski family went out to dinner in Sydney.
Larry was now renamed Lana and was dressed as a woman. A waiter
referred to Lana and Lynne as “ladies.” The next day, Lana showed up at
work in her new identity, as though nothing had happened.
But the
news got out, and the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors. Among other
things, the Wachowskis’ reclusiveness was now interpreted in terms of
Lana’s gender identity. When Lynne and Ron returned to Chicago,
reporters were camping in front of their house, the brazen ones ringing
the bell every once in a while.
Eventually, the press retreated.
Lana completed her divorce and met and fell in love with the woman who
became her second wife, in 2009. “I chose to change my exteriority to
bring it closer into alignment with my interiority,” she told me. “My
biggest fears were all about losing my family. Once they accepted me,
everything else has been a piece of cake. I know that many people are
dying to know if I have a surgically constructed vagina or not, but I
prefer to keep this information between my wife and me.”
I
first met the Wachowskis in December, 2009, when they were in the midst
of their struggle to find financing for “Cloud Atlas.” Uncomfortable
with being idle while they waited, they were also developing “Cobalt
Neural 9,” a project that had grown out of their frustration with the
Bush Presidency and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Curious about how
the early aughts would be perceived in the future, the Wachowskis
imagined a documentary film made eight decades from now, looking back at
the country’s plunge into imperial self-delusion. In order to write a
script for “Cobalt Neural 9,” the Wachowskis were filming interviews
with people, from Arianna Huffington to Cornel West, who they thought
might be able to help them elucidate their concerns. I was invited to
participate and was costumed to look as if I were speaking in 2090.
Dressed like a Bosnian Isaac Hayes (with sparkling lights attached to my
skull, a psychedelic shirt, and a New Age pendant), I ranted about the
malignant idiocy of the Bush regime. Lana sat next to the camera, asking
most of the questions, while Andy was somewhere beyond the lights, his
voice occasionally booming from the void.
Usually, I experience
an erosion of confidence around famous people—an inescapable conviction
that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more
available to them. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis.
Seemingly untouched by Hollywood, they did not project the jadedness
that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of the best-read
people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both
devout Bulls fans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of
narration and a passionate love for Chicago.
Eventually, I asked
them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.”
They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the
script to every major studio, after Warner Bros. had declined to
exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemed too
challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The
Matrix” had also been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them
nearly three years to get the green light on it. But the best the studio
could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility of buying
the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a
portion of the projected budget.
Since Costa Rica, the Wachowskis
and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of the script as an
evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential
decency of Zachry, with both characters embodying something of the
Everyman. Tom Hanks, they agreed, was the “ultimate Everyman of our
age.” “Our Jimmy Stewart,” Lana called him. They sent their script to
Hanks, and he agreed to meet with them. On the way to his office in
Santa Monica, the siblings received a phone call from their agent, who
told them that Warner Bros. had decided to hold off on a distribution
deal. “Cloud Atlas” had been subjected to an economic-modelling process
and the numbers had come back too low. The template that had been used,
according to the Wachowskis, was Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain”
(2006), because it had three autonomous story lines set in different
eras; “The Fountain,” which had a mixed critical response, had lost
almost twenty million dollars.
“The problem with market-driven
art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,” Lana told
me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality.
Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The
Matrix,” the Wachowskis recalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995
Keanu Reeves flop.
In the parking lot outside Hanks’s office, the
Wachowskis and Tykwer shook off the bad news before going in. Hanks had
read the screenplay, though not the book. “The script was not
user-friendly,” he told me. “The demands it put upon the audience and
everybody, the business risk, were off the scale.” But he was interested
in working with the directors and intrigued by the challenge of playing
six different roles in one film. Hanks was in the middle of reading
“Moby-Dick” and, when the filmmakers sat down, he engaged them in a
discussion of Melville’s masterpiece. Lana pointed at a poster for
“2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was serendipitously hanging on the wall
of Hanks’s office, and said, “ ‘Moby-Dick’ and this—that’s what we want
to do.” “I’m in,” Hanks said. “When do we start?” Looking back at that
meeting, Hanks told me that he had been particularly impressed that the
Wachowskis “were not ashamed to say, ‘We make art!’ ”
With Hanks
on board, the directors went back to Warner Bros. to plead their case.
They insisted that a project as narratively complex as “Cloud Atlas” had
no precedent and therefore no template. They presented the overarching
story as a tale of redemption, of the continuity of essential human
goodness, whereby individual acts of kindness have unforeseeable
repercussions. They broke the story down into a simple progression: “Tom
Hanks starts off as a bad person,” they said, “but evolves over
centuries into a good person.” Warner Bros. was convinced, and the
studio was in for distribution, but with a lower offer than the
directors had hoped for.
The projected budget
for the movie was around a hundred and twenty million dollars. The only
other guaranteed money was coming from the German Federal Film Fund. The
directors tried to drum up investment from other European sources, but
near-catastrophic reversals continued. “We realized we wouldn’t be able
to raise the amount of money we needed in a normal way, selling
territories for distribution,” Grant Hill, who has worked as a producer
with the Wachowskis since the two “Matrix” sequels, told me. “So we
started talking with distributors about taking equity in the project.”
Eventually, the production signed up a number of investors, including
four in Asia, whose contributions totalled about thirty-five million
dollars. But this financing structure was inherently unstable. With so
many separate investors, each providing relatively small amounts, the
entire project could teeter if one of them pulled out. With troubling
frequency, the filmmakers had to contemplate giving up. “It is hard to
grasp how often this movie has been dead and resurrected,” Lana said.
Each time they reread the script to see whether it was worth proceeding,
they emerged more determined, even if they had to revise it to fit the
diminished budget. But what they would not give up—the scale and the
complexity of the project—was exactly what was worrying potential
investors. “I’ll never be attached to anything like this in my life,”
Tykwer said. “It is that one thing I actually waited for when I wanted
to be a filmmaker.”
When a European investor said she would
contribute to the project, then withdrew her support in a text message,
the directors were desperate. But then, in the winter of 2010, the
Wachowskis sent the script to James Schamus, the head of Focus Features,
NBCUniversal’s art-house-films division. Schamus called them the next
day and offered to handle international sales for the movie. Reading the
script, he told them, had brought back what it was like to see “2001”
for the first time. Schamus teaches film theory and history at Columbia
University. In his office there, the level of his excitement not quite
compatible with the bow tie he was wearing, he told me, “The true genius
of the screenplay is that it’s ridiculously narrative. They’ve managed
to keep almost every little block of storytelling a cliffhanger. They’ve
managed to make you feel the kind of propulsive movement that makes you
want to keep coming back.”
Schamus cooked up a plan to presell
the movie at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, that May. He and the
filmmakers pitched the movie directly to an audience of distributors.
“We got on the stage of the Olympia Theatre in Cannes and spent
forty-five minutes in one of the most ridiculously fun cinephile
conversations you can have,” Schamus said. “I was giddy at the end.” The
three hundred industry people present seemed to enjoy it, too, a few of
them approaching Schamus afterward to share their enthusiasm. But the
numbers were disappointing, barely reaching fifteen million. Word of the
weak presale spread, and scared a few investors enough for them to flee
the production. When news of the decampment got out, more investors
backed off. “It is super frustrating that people think that it’s like a
stock market,” Andy said. “You bet on the movie you like because you
have taste. It’s not like buying Shell Oil. You get into the movie
business because you like movies. Not because you like money.” The
projected budget had to be pared down to about a hundred million
dollars, which, with all the contingency fees and financing costs, meant
an eighty-million-dollar shooting budget. This still made “Cloud Atlas”
one of the most expensive independently financed movies ever. The
Wachowskis, in addition to deferring their directing fees, invested some
of their own money in the project, betting their livelihood on its
success. “No work of art can ever really testify to the scale of its own
impossibility,” Lana said. One of the Wachowskis’ favorite films is
Jacques Tati’s “Playtime” (1967), for which Tati built a set the size of
a small town on the outskirts of Paris. The project ruined him
financially and almost ended his artistic career. The Wachowskis,
however, did not appear daunted by the risks of “Cloud Atlas.” “When you
have repetition of calamity, the calamity begins to lose its emotional
weight,” Andy said, with a shrug.
By June,
2011, the cast included, in addition to Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan
Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, and the Korean star
Doona Bae. The Wachowskis moved to Berlin to join Tykwer, with the
financing still in flux. Lana and Andy were going to direct the
nineteenth-century story and the two set in the future, while Tykwer
took the narratives set in the thirties, the seventies, and the present.
The plan was to work with two different crews but to collaborate
closely.
Around Thanksgiving, I visited the set in Babelsberg and
sat behind the Wachowskis as they shot a scene from the post-Fall story
line, in which Hanks’s Zachry takes Meronym (Berry), one of the last of a
tribe known as the Prescients, people who still have some access to
pre-Fall technology, to a defunct satellite-communication center, where
she hopes to put out a call for salvation for her people. Old Georgie
(Weaving), a hallucinated devil whom Zachry can’t shake, urges him to
kill her. (In addition to Zachry and the malevolent Dr. Goose, Hanks
also plays a thieving hotelier in the thirties, a nuclear scientist in
the seventies, a memoir-writing thug in the present, and an actor who
plays Timothy Cavendish in a movie in the twenty-second century.)
Berry
was suffering from a cold that day, in addition to her sore foot, so
the Wachowskis were working on closeups of Hanks and Weaving and hoping
that she would be well enough to shoot in the afternoon. There was no
apparent anxiety on the set. The Wachowskis were casual and relaxed. A
second camera was added, and they discussed the setup with their
director of photography, John Toll, a 1995 Academy Award winner for
“Legends of the Fall.” Hanks was in his chair, entertaining a crew
member. “I work for free. I get paid for waiting,” he quipped, quoting
Orson Welles. The Wachowskis decided to use 50-mm. and 100-mm. lenses,
going for some extreme closeups and a few “ ‘Batman’ angles.” Lana
climbed a ladder to point the viewfinder from above at Hanks’s stand-in.
She joked with a camera assistant, while Andy, in a Motörhead T-shirt,
began each suggestion to a crew member with “It might be quite nice . .
.” When I asked why Lana was always the one looking through the
viewfinder, while Andy covered the sight lines and the over-all
architecture of the shot, they were stumped by the question. Mitchell
refers to the two as “a kite operation”: “Andy is on the ground,
handling the spindle, anchored, while Lana is up there, performing the
loops.”
Ron Wachowski remembers watching his children direct a
scene on the set of “Bound.” Not having discussed anything between
themselves, Larry and Andy got up from their chairs to talk separately
to the actors, then sat back down without exchanging a word. Each of
them already knew what the other one had said. “They have the same
picture in their mind without talking,” he told me. “I watched two
bodies and one brain.” The phrase “two bodies, one brain” is often
deployed by people who have worked with the Wachowskis. According to
James McTeigue, who was their first assistant director on the “Matrix”
films, “There’s a little bit of myth in it. The unification of mind
comes through the filmmaking.” The siblings develop their ideas
together, arriving at a common vision after a long process of creative
negotiation; by the time they’re on the set, all possible disagreements
have been worked out. Their relationship, if anything, has improved
since Larry became Lana. “She’s a lot easier to work with than Larry,”
Andy told me. “Understandably, Larry had issues, but he could take them
out on people. On me. Lana is much more open-minded.” “They have the
best marriage I have ever seen” is how Ron Wachowski puts it.
If
the Wachowskis have a kind of marriage, their cast and crew are their
family. (Toward the end of the shoot, Hanks even took to calling them
Mom and Dad.) Steve Skroce, who has storyboarded for them since the
“Matrix” films, told me, “After the success of the first ‘Matrix,’ they
were able to get points on the box-office, video games, etc. They had a
dinner at this great Italian restaurant in Santa Monica and all their
key collaborators were invited. At each place setting was a golden
envelope with a check inside. I’m not sure who got what, but I know what
I received was far beyond what I could ever have guessed or hoped for.”
At Babelsberg’s Stage 9, on one of the two monitor screens,
Weaving, as the devil Old Georgie, was now hissing, “Lies . . . nothin’
but lies,” while Hanks’s lower lip trembled. In the script, much depends
on whether Zachry will decide to obey Old Georgie’s command to kill
Meronym, so Hanks went through a series of takes exploring his moral
entanglement. When Old Georgie advised Zachry to “slit her throat,”
Weaving relished the succulence of the sibilants, and the directors
giggled with joy. The set was rudimentary: the control room of the
satellite-communication center would be completed with
computer-generated imagery, imagined by the Wachowskis down to the
minutest detail. The scene in the control room, for example, features an
“orison,” a kind of super-smart egg-shaped phone capable of producing
3-D projections, which Mitchell had dreamed up for the futuristic
chapters. The Wachowskis, however, had to avoid the cumbersome reality
of having characters running around with egg-shaped objects in their
pockets; it had never crossed Mitchell’s mind that that could be a
problem. “Detail in the novel is dead wood. Excessive detail is your
enemy,” Mitchell told me, squeezing the imaginary enemy between his
thumb and index finger. “In film, if you want to show something, it has
to be designed.” The Wachowskis’ solution: the orison is as flat as a
wallet and acquires a third dimension only when spun. Mitchell, who had
been kept in the loop throughout the process (and has a cameo in the
film), was boyishly excited by the filmmakers’ “groping toward
exactitude.” “I was like Augustus Gloop in the Wonka factory,” he told
me. “I’ve witnessed a long sequence of decisions, which I never had to
make while writing a book. Intellectually, I know it’s a replacement,
but I don’t feel a loss at all.”
Weaving now lowered his voice to
reach the outer ranges of whisper, his tongue menacingly close to
Hanks’s ear: “How long you goin’ jus’ stand there an’ let a stranger
keep fuggin’ your b’liefs up ’n’ down ’n’ in ’n’ out!” The Wachowskis
exchanged glances and nods. Hanks’s face tightened into resolution as he
walked out of the shot.
Eventually, Ralph
Riach recovered from his illness and was able to finish his scenes. The
production went over schedule by only a few days, and the shooting of
“Cloud Atlas” was completed in December. In March, the Wachowskis and
Tykwer flew to Los Angeles to show a hundred-and-seventy-minute cut of
the movie to Warner Bros. executives in Burbank. A small group,
including Jeff Robinov, the Wachowskis’ former agent and the current
president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, had gathered for the morning
screening. The directors were nervous, not only because much depended on
the reaction of the studio honchos but also because Hollywood
executives were not their ideal audience. If what you’re aiming for is
rebellious originality, the suits should have trouble liking and
understanding your work. The directors introduced the movie, then left
the screening room. When the film was over, the executives tracked them
down in a nearby office and delivered a spontaneous burst of applause.
“That almost never happens,” Lana said afterward, with a disbelieving
head shake. Perhaps, she added, the applause would translate into an
enthusiastic marketing campaign—starting with placement of the “Cloud
Atlas” trailer before “The Dark Knight Rises,” Warner’s flagship 2012
summer release. (In the event, that didn’t pan out.)
The
Wachowskis had told me that one of the “orgasmic” moments in their
filmmaking process is showing a movie to their friends and family. I
attended that screening, later the same day. “Cloud Atlas,” I
discovered, would have been the perfect movie for a Wachowski family
film orgy. It seemed poised to usher audiences into an era of
imaginative adventure filmmaking beyond the mindless nihilism of
“Transformers” or “Resident Evil.” The movie carefully guided the viewer
through its six story lines with just enough intriguing unfamiliarity,
while succeeding—nearly miraculously—in creating a sense of
connectedness among the myriad characters and retaining Mitchell’s idea
of the universality of love, pain, loss, and desire. Doona Bae, who
plays (among others) Sonmi~451, the “fabricant” who evolves into full
humanity in 2144, was a revelation. The Wachowskis’ formal boldness,
balanced with heartwarming redemption, was a perfect match for Tykwer’s
precise filmmaking and gorgeous music. (He and his musical partners
composed the “Cloud Atlas” soundtrack before shooting even started.) In
addition to applause at this screening, there were tears and triumphant
hugs. The Wachowskis and Tykwer were visibly touched. Their rocket ship
had reached its cosmic port. (The movie will première at the Toronto
Film Festival in September, and open nationwide on October 26th.)
The
previous fall, the “Cloud Atlas” production had spent six weeks on
location in Mallorca. The Wachowskis were shooting scenes set on the
Prophetess, the schooner on which much of the nineteenth-century story
takes place. The filming proved challenging—the weather was not
coöperative; the ship was hard to maneuver; shooting in its cramped
spaces was difficult—but through it all Lana had, she said, “a
self-awareness of gathering memories . . . a sense of witnessing”
something extraordinary. More than ever before, she was convinced that
the experience of making “Cloud Atlas” was going to be special.
One
day, the siblings had planned a helicopter shot of a nearby mountain.
Andy and Lana hoped to swoop down from above with an aerial camera. But,
as the helicopter was ascending, a mass of clouds moved in, and the
Wachowskis and the camera crew found themselves lost in whiteness. While
waiting for the fog to disperse, the helicopter climbed above it. “The
sun was butterscotch yellow,” Lana recalled. “And there it all was, you
know—an atlas of clouds.” She and Andy watched the celestial landscape
until a hole opened in the cloud bank and the helicopter was able to
sink through it and below to discover the verdant landscape of their
imaginary world.
♦
